‘Maybe.’
The floods do not usually damage the air routes. But if one of the supporting poles has fallen, it could affect the whole network.
‘I expect we will get word when the watergraph starts working again,’ Weaver says. She turns her face towards me. It is the colour of dark wood. ‘But that is not why I was looking for you.’ She pauses. ‘Alva would like to see us both.’
‘Alva?’ The request surprises me. ‘Did she say why?’
‘She believes we should go and meet the patient together. She has something to show us.’
The thought of seeing the girl again is a cold stone within me.
‘I had hoped to get some sleep before breakfast,’ I say.
Weaver’s gaze is deep in the growing daylight, full of thoughts.
‘Come,’ she says.
When the house-elder says so in the House of Webs, you obey.
The first thing I sense is the surge of heat through the door. Then, a cluster of scents. In the House of Webs, the sick bay is the only place apart from the kitchen where live fire is allowed. Even laundry is washed in cold water most of the time. Alva stands by the stove, feeding wood into the spark-spitting metal maw. A steaming pot of water sits on the stove, and next to it another one with an inch of dark-brown liquid in it. I inhale, recognize liquorice and lavender, hops and passionflower. The rest blurs into a blend of unfamiliar scents. On the table, next to scales, mortars and bags of herbs, I notice a neatly laid-out row of needles cooling down on a polished metal tray.
Alva closes the hatch of the stove and wipes her hands carefully with a steaming towel.
‘We’ll need a gondola,’ she says. ‘We cannot keep her here.’
‘I will send for a gondola to take her to the Hospital Quarters as soon as I can,’ Weaver says. ‘The watergraph pipes are too badly flooded.’
‘Again?’ Alva picks up a glass jar from the tall shelf that fills the space behind the table. I see dozens of teardrop-shaped wings stirring, hair-thin legs moving, and something round and black and bright. Eyes stare directly at me.
‘There is nothing we can do but wait,’ Weaver responds.
Alva turns towards us with the jar in her hand.
‘She’s awake,’ she says. ‘But she can’t talk.’
‘Why not?’ I ask.
‘It’s best if you see her now,’ Alva says. ‘She’ll need a new singing medusa in any case.’
Alva walks across the room to the medusa tank. It sits on robust legs of stone, as wide as the wall: a smooth, oblong pool of glass rounded on the edges, covered by a lid with a slim opening at one end. The singing medusas float through the water without hurry, their translucent swimming bells pale green and blue, weightless in their water-space. Alva unscrews the lid of the jar and holds the jar upside down over the opening. Wings and limbs and eyes move, first behind the glass and then briefly in the air, as she shakes the jar.
The medusas reach their thin tentacles towards the insects raining into the water, close their round, murky bells around the black-green gleam of the beetles and flies. Alva lets the last sticky-limbed insect fall into the tank. Then she dips the glass jar in, collecting some water into it. She picks up a small hoop net from a hook on the wall and pushes it into the tank. The bloom of medusas opens and pulls away, their tentacles wavering like broken threads in a breeze, but Alva has already caught one. It is small and slippery and blue-green, and it seems to shrivel, to lose its colour and grace as soon as it is out of water.
Alva slips the medusa into the glass jar, where it opens again like a flower, but now constrained, without joy. As we watch, it begins to open and close, open and close, and in an echo of its movements, the bloom in the tank begins to do the same. A low, faint humming vibrates in the water, refracts from the glass walls, grows towards the ceiling until it seems to ring through our bones.
Alva hangs the hoop net back on the wall hook. The water dripping from it draws a dark trail on the wall towards the floor. She parts the curtains covering a wide doorway into the back room and steps through. Weaver and I follow. Slowly the singing recedes behind us and fades into a silence as dense as mourning, or farewells left unspoken.
There are only six beds in the room, and despite the faint lighting I can see that five of them are empty. In the furthermost bed by the back wall lays a narrow, motionless figure. She is covered by a rough blanket, but I can discern her form under it: long limbs, softness sheltering angular bones. The warmth from the iron stove spreads across the skin of my neck.
Our shadows fall deep and shapeless, interlacing where the fragile halos of the glow-glasses overlap, hemming in the bed we are approaching. There is no light on the back wall. Thick curtains cover the window.
Dimmed glow-glass globes hang on the walls. Weaver picks one, shakes it and places it on the girl’s bedside table. A blue-tinted light wakes up within the sphere. Slowly it expands and falls on the girl’s face. I notice there is also an empty cup on the table.
The girl is approximately my age, between twenty and twenty-five. There are still dry, rust-brown tangles in her red hair, but the garment she is wearing is clean. Or so I think at first, until I notice the burst of tiny speckles on the front. As if someone had tried to paint an impression of faraway stars on it, the sparkling Web of Worlds that holds the skies together.
She struggles to sit up on the mattress. Her eyes are grey and full of shadows in the glow-glass light, and her skin is very pale. Her lips are squeezed together so tightly it makes her face look older, shrivelled upon itself. I realize Alva has made her drink a calming herbal brew. Yet behind its artificial languor the girl is tense and all edge, like a dagger drowned in murky water, ready to cut the first skin that will brush it.
‘In order to help you,’ Weaver says, ‘we need to know who you are.’
The girl nods slowly.
‘She is not island-born,’ Alva says.
The lines on Weaver’s face seem to sharpen. She looks at Alva.
‘Why didn’t you tell me earlier?’
‘I wanted to show you,’ Alva says. ‘May I?’
The girl’s eyes close and open again. The question seems to sink in letter by letter. Eventually, she moves her head slowly up and down. I do not know if this is because nodding hurts, or because she is too dazed to make faster movements.
Alva directs the girl to rotate her upper body slightly, face turned away from us. She gathers the girl’s hair gently in her hand and lifts it. The skin of the neck is bare: there is no trace of ink where the sun-shaped tattoo marking everyone born on the island should be. I glance at Weaver, catch a glimpse of the shadows on her brow. There are not many people on the island who were born elsewhere. Seamen and merchants come and go, but most islanders avoid mingling with them.
‘May I see your arms?’ Weaver asks.
Alva lets go of the girl’s hair and the girl turns her face back towards us, her movements still underwater-slow. She nods again.
‘I already checked,’ Alva said. ‘She must have moved to the island when she was very young.’
Weaver pulls up the sleeves of the girl’s garment. One of the arms is bare. Not from the Houses of Crafts, then. The other has a row of short, black lines on it, like wounds on the pale skin. Weaver counts them.
‘Twenty-one,’ she says. That is two less than I have.
Weaver lets go of the girl’s arms. The girl leans back into her pillows in a half-sitting posture.
‘Were you born on the continent?’ Weaver asks her.
The girl nods.
‘Are